Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 3: A Witcher Without Silver
Lannor first used the wafting method, carefully fanning a thread of mist toward his nose.
He had to be certain the power-laced fog was not poisonous in itself, or harmful in some other way. Had the biological computer in his brain, the one he had picked up during his journey through the Void Sea, possessed spare processing power, he could have learned the answer by merely touching the mist with a fingertip.
Unfortunately, his neural processing had already been diverted.
So an Intelligence Core from a high-technology world had been reduced to this.
A faint sting spread through his nasal passages, sharp and peppery, but his witcher body adjusted almost at once. Lannor gave the smallest nod. The toxin would burn out an ordinary man’s lungs within five minutes. For a witcher, it would bring discomfort, but it would not cause harm within half an hour.
It would not affect combat.
His thin leather boot stepped cautiously into the edge of the fog.
With a soft rasp, Lannor drew the steel sword from his back as he felt his way forward. A wooden grip, iron-gray steel crossguard and blade. A Velen longsword. Like everything folk thought of that province, it was cheap, crude, and badly made.
It lacked the restraining effect of silver, but against corporeal monsters, it was not useless.
As far as Lannor knew, this monster-hunting contract had come from an elder in a nearby village. According to him, a certain delicious fungus grew in this valley, thick and nowhere else. It was the only thing their village could sell for a decent price to merchants in Gors Velen, Velen’s capital.
Then, a year ago, the fog had appeared without warning. Those who went in to gather mushrooms never came back.
Now the village did not even have a single sound iron farming tool left.
No coin.
When the two witchers arrived, the village scraped together the last of its money, fifty-three orens, to hire the filthy, evil “mutants” to clear away the “wicked fog in the valley.” When the elder threw them the advance, his face twisted with fear and disgust, as if he had been forced to touch lepers.
It reminded the modern mind inside Lannor’s skull that even if he escaped his “teacher,” his situation would still be far from good.
But troubles had their order.
The ones waiting in the future could remain there.
The danger before him had to be met now.
Lannor’s amber cat eyes stung faintly in the poisoned mist, yet he did not blink, not even once to wet them. The heightened senses born from witcher mutation began to stir. That enhancement, wrought through disease, elixirs, magic, and worse, could greatly amplify and alter the original human senses, making witchers fit for the purpose sorcerers had designed them for.
To hunt monsters alone.
His thin leather boots scraped weeds across the ground, making a sound as faint as insect wings.
“No heavy breathing here. No strong monster heartbeat either ... quiet.”
All Lannor could hear were his own footsteps and Bordon’s behind him. Bordon’s steps and heartbeat were lighter than his.
It was hard to imagine such sounds belonging to a musclebound giant close to six-foot-three, wearing a full set of heavy composite armor.
Monstrous bodily control. Monstrous fundamentals.
Lannor could picture it, the absurd scene from some film, a man lifted by the throat with one hand before his neck was crushed in the grip.
His witcher “mentor” could truly do it.
Then, as Lannor felt his way forward, touch and hearing caught something wrong at the same time.
His vertical pupils narrowed and shifted focus.
“Below the ground ... trembling? Burrowing!”
Soil and stone were being dug aside. Something was moving beneath the earth.
Not a Foglet.
Without thinking, Lannor’s spine arched like a startled cat’s, then snapped straight in the next instant. His body sprang a full pace aside like a bent root released under tension.
With a crash of loose earth, a vicious humanoid claw burst from below.
The monster dragged the rest of its body out after it. Humanoid, but short, about the height of a dwarf, no higher than a grown man’s belly. Gray-white skin lay bare and slick. A blood-streaked mouth split open in a savage grin. Fold upon fold of swollen flesh crowded around its neck until the neck itself could not be seen, wet and foul.
Lannor’s sword hand loosened, then tightened again, testing the grip over and over.
A Nekker.
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